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Mirages, Op 113

Introduction

Fauré wrote Mirages at the age of seventy-four. His attention was drawn to these poems, in the year that they were published, by the husband of the work’s eventual dedicatee. He chose four of Brimont’s sixty texts that were published in a beautiful edition, worthy of an arty aristocrat, with woodcuts by Georges Barbier. The book’s cover has a small vignette in black and gold where a Cupid holds a circular mirror in which is reflected the mouth, neck and hair of a beautiful woman; Brimont’s tastes, like those of the Princesse de Polignac, were Sapphic – thus the ‘caresses de sœur’ in the cycle’s second song, and the naked eroticism of Danseuse. The poems are preceded by frontispiece words that remind us that the First World War had only just ended: ‘Music [Musiques] singing to the ear of the poet, visions from before the torment; dreams and nostalgia, reflections or mirages of that which persists despite everything, and which brings us calm in Nature’s eternity.’ After having composed his two great cycles to poems by Van Lerberghe, Fauré obviously felt at ease with this kind of symbolism – more accessible than, say, Mallarmé – which permitted him uneventful passion and event-filled calm. The poet was more or less unknown so he felt no compunction in making cuts to serve his purposes. One of these was to provide the young singer Madeleine Grey, one of his recent protégées, with a new work to perform – a reward for her fine advocacy of La chanson d’Ève.

Recordings

'Hyperion's sound is impeccable and in both his playing and accompanying essay, Graham Johnson penetrates to the heart of one of music's most subtle a ...'There can be nothing but praise for Johnson's pianism and his selection and arrangement of the songs. Volumes 3 and 4 are eagerly awaited' (The Sunda ...» More

My mind is a gentle, harmonious swan Gliding slowly along the shores of ennui On the fathomless waters of dreams and delusion, Of echo, of mist, of shadow, of night.

He glides, a haughty monarch cleaving a path, Pursuing a vain reflection, precious and fleeting, And the countless reeds bow as he passes, Dark and silent before a silver moon;

And each round corolla of the white water-lilies Has blossomed by turn with desire or hope … But ever forward on the mists and the waves, The black swan glides toward the receding unknown.

And I said: ‘Renounce, beautiful chimera of a swan, This slow voyage to troubled destinies; No Chinese miracle, no exotic America Will welcome you in safe havens;

The scented gulfs, the immortal isles Await you, black swan, with their perilous reefs; Remain on the lakes which faithfully reflect These clouds, these flowers, these stars, and these eyes.’

English: Richard Stokes

F major (original key) 3/4 Andantino

This is the opening poem in the section of Mirages entitled De l’eau et des paysages. Fauré realizes that the poet’s reference (in her second strophe) to the swan’s neck being like an unfurling snake would strike a false note in music of such ineffable calm. He cuts this, and three others quatrains. There are nevertheless other strange images that he does allow – ‘No Chinese miracle, no exotic America Will welcome you in safe havens’. It has always seemed to me that this swan, who can only exist in his own lake, and for whom foreign travel is now pointless, is Fauré himself – a haughty monarch on the ‘shores of ennui’. In the closing phase of his life he exists in ‘fathomless waters of dreams and delusion, Of echo, of mist, of shadow, of night’. Thus the uncrowned (if contested) king of French music pursues his noble, lonely path in a miasma of hearing difficulties and corporeal disintegration; he sails serenely ‘on the mists and waves … toward the receding unknown’. The music is a marvel: the opening chords of the accompaniment, as well as the rising of the vocal line (a motif that runs through all the songs in this cycle) recall the song Lydia. Thus the composer is at one with himself from fifty-four years earlier. The transformation from one age to the other has been gradual and organic, something that seems part of nature itself: one is tempted to compare Fauré’s late style with the lofty sagacity of the elderly Goethe. The vocal line fails to register a tune as such, yet it suggests melody distilled to its essence. The seemingly self-effacing accompaniment steers the music through harmonic waters of a seemingly shallow range, yet this lake is as deep as any sea, and this music as profound as any ever written by a French composer. Le cygne from Ravel’s celebrated Histoires naturelles song cycle (1906) is a remarkably beautiful creation, but it must make way for the regal black swan that Ravel’s old teacher, thirteen years later, has conjured from thin air.

And the gallop of the Aegypans, And the fountain cascading In saltless tears … In the secret and sacred woods I heard the hamadryad’s Endless quivering.

Cherished, mysterious Past, Reflected in my eyes Like a cloud, It would be pleasant and sweet for me To embark with you, O Past, On the long voyage! …

If I slip, the waters will ripple In rings … in rings … In rin … And then the enchanted mirror Will grow limpid once more, Cold and serene.

English: Richard Stokes

B flat major (original key) 4/4 Quasi adagio

This is another miracle of a musical journey; it begins with the seeming cliché of seemingly aimless oscillating quavers underpinning even less of a melody, as such, than we have encountered at the beginning of the cycle. From these tiny, unassuming cells grows a song of rare range and power – a combination of Debussy’s Chansons de Bilitis (especially in the song’s fifth verse) and Duparc’s La vie antérieure with its ‘naked slaves all drenched in perfume’. On the printed page the music might seem like a chant, or a piece of dry recitative; in fact, these minute inflections are culminative events in the evolution of an organic masterpiece. Only by following the train of the poet’s thought alongside the composer himself can the listener enter into the mysteries of this composer’s late style – Fauré undertone disdains any attempt to grab attention from an uncooperative pair of ears. In the fifth strophe the bass line unexpectedly takes on a loping stride, entirely appropriate to the exotic, ritualistic nature of the words. The final strophe contains an effect which is unique (although Fauré tested these waters in Accompagnement): the ripples formed on the lake’s surface are first strong, then progressively weaker, a dispersal of energy that is reflected by triplets dissolving into duplets, and then melting into silence. This ingenious, even avant-garde, passage is one of the most haunting in all French song; it is also a moment when Fauré’s art blends into that of Debussy at the apex of French creative sensibility. (The older composer must have been aware that the title of his song already belonged to a famous piano piece by Debussy who had died the previous year.) Absolute serenity is restored in the last verse; the piano’s harmonies are ever-changing, yet the surface of the water is unruffled. Fauré is a practised expert in depicting movement and stasis at the same time. The composer cuts four strophes of Brimont’s poem, including a reference to herds of goats with the smell of their curdled milk. His instinct for avoiding images that could not be incorporated in his increasingly rarefied stylistic world is infallible.

Nocturnal garden brimming with silence, Now the full moon is swaying In light and liquid veils of gold; Close she seems, yet far away … Her face is laughing in the heart of the fountain And shadows pale beneath dark orange-trees.

I know your delicious and sullen peace, Your scents of iris, of jasmine, of rose, Your beauty ruffled by desire and ennui … O silent garden! The waters in the basin drip With a faint and magical sound … I listen To this kiss which sings on the lips of Night.

English: Richard Stokes

E flat major (original key) 3/4 Andantino

No one who has listened to the astonishingly beautiful 78rpm recording of Pierre Bernac and Poulenc could doubt the haunting quality of this music, a gentle moto perpetuo that reflects the inscrutable workings of nature. This duo recorded only this one song from Mirages. Jean-Michel Nectoux points out that its position as the third in a set, where all the songs are of a similar andante tempo, militates against its effectiveness. Perhaps these songs, unlike the great German quasi-narrative cycles, should not necessarily be heard in one sitting. The composer happily embraces all three of the poet’s strophes. The water music is that of a distantly lapping fountain – comparisons with the limpid undulations of Debussy’s Baudelaire setting Le jet d’eau come to mind. The articulation of the left hand, here flowing, and there interrupted by rests, dispenses water, as if falling drop by drop into the fountain’s basin. Apart from this hypnotic sound this enchanted garden is indeed ‘tout empli de silence’. Just as he can write music that moves while stationary, Fauré knows better than anyone the secret of writing music that resounds in its own silence: the heavenly calm evoked by ‘Nul bruit’ alone accomplishes this seemingly impossible task. Key words flow past in the glinting moonlight of the music: ‘lointaine’, ‘invisibles’, ‘volupté’, ‘morose’, the erotic ‘délectable’ and the almost heartbreaking ‘faible et magique’ (the second word plunging a sixth, by far the biggest interval in the song, a descent into the depth of dreams). We hear the wisdom of an old man who has learned to put the passions of yesterday behind him. The ‘caresses sensibles’ of a lifetime of adult ardour are now confined to memory and are at one with the mystical connections that the composer felt for the monastery garden at Montgauzy in which he grew up, the isolated place where he first learned to interpret the sounds, smells and sights of the natural world. ‘En ma fin gît mon commencement’, as Mary Stuart’s motto had it or, in T S Eliot’s inversion, ‘In my beginning is my end’.

The poem with all its six verses strikes something of a Rimbaud-like note – Antique (‘Gracieux fils de Pan’) set by Britten in Les illuminations comes to mind. Fauré cuts two strophes, one of which contains lascivious references to the dancer as a ‘doux reptile’, her breasts anointed with oil for lovemaking in the ‘nuits stériles’ of her sisterhood. Seven years after the travesti shenanigans of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, Fauré chose not to flirt with the new sexual freedom and openness that pervaded the post-war world. Yet this music belongs to the twentieth century in a different way from the other songs of the cycle. Is the composer, so late in his life, allowing himself to be influenced by the Debussy of the late sonatas and neoclassical Stravinsky? Possibly, but he is also continuing to explore the modal aspects of the ancient world that began with his Lydia in 1871, and which were taken up by Chausson in Hébé (1882) and by Reynaldo Hahn in his Études latines (1900). Fauré’s own opera Pénélope (1907–12) embraced a phlegmatic Hellenism. In Danseuse we have no bargain-basement pastiche, rather the purest evocation of Attic economy, precision and pudeur. Even if the music of the ancient Greeks did not sound like this, we feel that Fauré has captured something of its essential spirit. Jankelevitch calls this the music of ‘parfaite nudité’, and it is true the song is stripped to its essentials. If its tireless balletic rhythms also contain the energy of the Dionysiac (an obsessive concentration on A, a dominant pedal, pervades much of the song), this seems filtered by time and distance into a dance both chaste and remote, a merging of sacred and profane. The dancer is both energetic and intangible. Fauré has written an erotic song that cloaks its eroticism in the ethereal shroud of time. The listener is like the explorer who opens an ancient tomb and glimpses its treasures for a few seconds before they dissolve into dust. This is yet another mark of the epic nature of Fauré’s renunciation, the ascent from the physical into the higher contemplative realms which characterizes his last period.